Blood Red Room
by dragonifyoudare
Summary: In which Natalia has her first crush, her first kiss, and her first doubts. Not a romance. (Now with the formatting it was supposed to have from the beginning)
1. One

Disclaimer: This is a fan work only, and no profit is being made from it. This disclaimer applies to the entire work.

A/N: I'm working off of a headcanon timeline cobbled together from the MCU and what I could find on various wikis about the comics. To put it simply Natasha is older than her file in the MCU indicates, but not as old as in the comics.

* * *

The first thing Natalia Romanova learns about her new instructor is that no one talks about him by name, or even by codename. The Red Room girls are told to refer to him as "Sir."

It makes it harder to exchanged whispered stories about him after lights out in the dormitory, but also makes speculation about him more exciting. The dormitory is monitored. Their whole lives are monitored, but they are accustomed to it. They are permitted a certain degree of normalcy in some things, to encourage the development of social skills, and thirteen year old girls gossiping after dark is one aspect of that permissiveness.

Natalia doesn't participate in the late night discussions. Her thoughts are her own, the only thing she can really claim ownership over. Why should she give them away?

Sometimes she wonders if she should feel guilty about her possessiveness.

* * *

Natalia would memorize the new instructor's face, if he ever took off the mask (The arm she dismisses as too easily to disguise or alter to be a distinguishing feature). She's been taught to learn faces quickly, whether of targets or allies, and it unnerves her not to be able to follow through on that training. She speculates that this is why he always wears the mask, to desensitize his trainees to this feeling, and she memorizes the combat techniques he drills the girls in. Every night, she goes over the forms in her mind. When she starts significantly outpacing the other trainees, he starts giving her additional training, private lessons.

She learns sixteen new ways to kill a human being in the first month of training with the new instructor. She also turns thirteen.

* * *

Some nights, after she reviews the day's training, she imagines what the instructor (he's not new anymore) looks like under his mask.

* * *

Two months after she turns thirteen, Natalia begins training in using her sexuality as a weapon: how to sway her (slim, slightly boney) hips just so, what to do with her hands when to distract even without touching, how to make her eyes promise things she doesn't really understand yet. Sometimes, she pictures a target for her actions. Sometimes, she pictures the target has one of the faces she has imagined for her teacher.

* * *

It has been three months since she began her private training when she defeats the instructor for the first and only time in the sparring circle . It shouldn't have happened. He's more skilled than her, stronger and faster than any skinny thirteen year old girl. There are no outside factors giving her an advantage, but she beats sweeps his legs out from under him and his head hits the floor hard. Before he reacts she has him in hold that would let her snap his neck even with her scrawny build.

It shouldn't have happened. His reaction times have been off by just a split second since the training session began.

He looks up at her, slightly dazed, and she can see a hint of a smile in his eyes.

"Good job," he says, in English. His eyes flash with confusion. "Good job," he says again, this time in Russian.

* * *

The last day she trains with him, she kisses him through the mask. She's been trying out her new skills on him all week in private lessons: the hips, the hands, the doesn't really understand what she's feeling, only that this man is everything she wants to be and he thinks she's worth private lessons. No one has made her feel special like this before.

He hasn't reacted at all.

At the end of that last session, he tells her she's done remarkably well and that one of these days she may actually be able to take him down when he's actually trying. It takes her a moment to understand that he's almost making a joke. Over the last few months he's loosened up in some indefinable way, but this is the most animated, the most human she's ever seen him.

She stands up on her toes and presses her mouth to where his lips must be under the mask. He freezes and then, very gently, puts his right hand - his flesh and blood hand - on her shoulder and pushes her away.

"You're beautiful, Natalia. Beautiful, smart and strong. Any man would be lucky to have you. But you're still a child," he says. It's the first time she's ever heard him say anything not directly related to training.

"And you deserve better than me," he adds, in English.

The next day, there is a new combat instructor.


	2. Two

A/N: I'm seeking a beta for a longer piece that's a sequel to this one. PM me if you're interested, or if you need more details to know if you're interested.

* * *

Natalia is taken to a medical facility. They haven't told her the exact nature of the procedure she is to undergo, but she does know that it has to do with her performance in training. She's always been good, but for the last few months she's been exemplary. They're investing more resources in her and, while it's not a reward, it is an acknowledgement.

It has been two weeks and two days since her favorite instructor disappeared, the day after she tried to kiss him. She's maintained her performance because she always performs to the best of her abilities, but also because concentrating on training keeps her from wondering things she shouldn't be wondering.

She tries not to stare out the tinted windows of the van that takes her there, but it's hard. She hasn't left the Red Room facility in years. Seeing this much of her country is something special, and not just because it's a novelty. The last time she was out of the facility, when she and a few of the other top students had been presented to some highly placed Party officials as evidence of the Red Room's efficacy, the van had a partition between separating the passengers from the driver and no windows in the passenger area. The window means they want her desensitized to the outside world. They'll start deploying her soon, if not for real missions than for field training. She feels a hot flash of pride when she figures this out, but also a flash of freezing cold terror.

* * *

Natalia is laid out on a surgical gurney, stomach exposed but the rest of her body covered with a surgical drape Natalia listens to the medical team's chatter. She doesn't need to know what's going on, but a good agent is always alert for additional intelligence. Most of what's said is too technical for Natalia to understand, but she does catch some things. One of them, the last thing she hears before the anesthesia overwhelms her, is what sticks in her mind the most, afterward.

"It's really too bad we don't have the Germans' records," says one of the surgeon's assistants, a woman. She's looking at a tray of syringes like they're students who have disappointed her.

"It would have done us much good on this one. We're going for a very different effect, for all that it's an Erskine derivative," says the other assistant, a man with nervous hands. The woman transfers her disapproval to him.

"Think, Utkin. Consider what kind of samples they want from her, and the history of the second subject," the woman says.

The surgeon gives both of them a hard look, and a breathing mask is placed over Natalia's mouth. I _wouldn't be able to feel a kiss through it,_ she thinks as her head fills with fog.

* * *

She wakes in fits and starts.

* * *

The first time, she wakes to an alarm blaring, somewhere nearby. It gives her a headache. She slips back into unconsciousness.

* * *

The second time, she wakes to too-bright lights and a searing pain in her abdomen. She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths, trying to grasp the threads of a dream. Someone had been talking to her? She hadn't been able to answer because she had no face. She wonders if that was what they did to her in surgery

A door opens nearby and two voices enter. Natalia concentrates on her breathing. It helps with the pain. She must have a face if she's breathing.

"He nearly got out. We should call it in," someone says. The voice is male, deep but hesitant.

"He didn't." Female, curt, vaguely familiar. She's under strain, more so than when she had chastised Utkin.

"Yes, but doctor-"

"Who do you think will take the blame for this if we report it?"

"They went against all our recommendations, going this long without a full wipe. We told them that depending on the drugs alone this long would-"

"Who do you think will take the blame?"

Someone does something to the IV stand beside Natalia's bed, and her eyelids are so heavy she couldn't open them if she wanted to. She sleeps.

* * *

The third time, she wakes to crisp footsteps heading away from the little room she's in. Shakily, she gets to her feet, leaning on the IV stand.

He mind isn't just full of fog, it is fog. Her thoughts are insubstantial whips that billow away as she tries to grasp them. She's not where she's supposed to be sleeping, so she she slides the needle out of her arm, pulls off the monitor leads and sets out in search of the dormitory.

The halls are unfamiliar, so she slips into a careful sort of stealth. It's easy, when you only see new places during training simulations, to form that habit.

She's tired, but she can't find the dormitory and she's lost the way back to the room she was in before (not acceptable, she'll be in trouble for that lapse), so she looks for somewhere secure to rest, just for a little while.

She finds a supply closet. It isn't secure enough, but one of the walls is concrete and she thinks that might support her weight if she can get in through the ceiling tiles. She can. There's actually a whole section of cement, maybe the ceiling of a utility area. She lies down on that and drifts away.

* * *

The fourth time, she wakes to sounds of agony and the awareness that she is in a great deal of trouble.

Normally her thoughts would immediately zero in on the fact that she has wandered out of her recovery room and that she's been unsupervised for who knows how long, but she knows the voice making those strange, keening screams and broken sobs coming up from below her.

There's a crack in the concrete a little way from her ear. She rolls over and puts her eye to it.

He's facing away from her, jammed into one corner the cell. There's blood smeared on the walls and floor. Most of it is dried, some of it is fresh, and some of it is just old stains. Objectively, she knows it isn't all that much blood. That doesn't stop the bottom of her gut from dropping out. She can see the fingernail gouges on the back of his neck.

Natalia skitters away from the crack in the concrete and retches, bile stinging the back of her throat. She sits for a long time, looking at her shaking hands. Then she goes looking for her room.

* * *

They find her wandering the halls. She apes her earlier disorientation. They guide her back to bed, hook her back up, and leave her alone with her thoughts.

What she thinks, mostly, is _an agent does not question her superiors' tactics_. She thinks it until she almost believes it.


End file.
